Public websites
Pricing published by agricultural retailers and distributors on publicly accessible websites.
An experiment in price transparency.
Just Prices exists to test one idea: that a market works better when the people in it can actually see prices. We take a market where prices are scattered and hard to compare, and we publish what we can find. FarmPricing, covering crop protection products, is our first venture.
One product, three reported prices
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Glyphosate 4L 275 gal tote
$8.65/gal
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Glyphosate 4L 275 gal tote
$8.20/gal
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Glyphosate 4L 275 gal tote
$7.85/gal
What we're testing
Plenty of people will tell you transparency is good for a market. Fewer go and find out. Just Prices was formed to do the second thing: take a market where price information is scattered across seller websites and private quotes, bring more of it into one place, and see what changes.
Can a market work better when the people in it can see prices?
That's the whole hypothesis, and it's not obviously true. Visibility might tighten spreads, or it might just move the conversation. It might help the smallest buyer most, or help whoever already had the best information. We'd rather measure it than assert it.
What has changed is the cost of trying. Collecting prices from scattered sources and keeping them current used to be slow manual work, and we think that expense is a large part of why so many markets stayed opaque. Over the last couple of years AI has brought the cost of that work down sharply.
So the technical barrier is much lower than it was, and the open question is no longer whether this can be built. It's whether a market will support it.
How it works
This approach is not specific to agriculture. We believe it's what we'd do in any market where prices exist but are hard to see.
Collect
Gather prices from wherever they already exist publicly. Some are published on seller websites. Some come from buyers who tell us what they paid, or from sellers who send us their own sheets.
Standardize
Put every price into the same units. A price per gallon and a price per 275-gallon tote aren't comparable until somebody does the arithmetic.
Match
Work out which products are the same product. One active ingredient can sell under a dozen brand names, and a generic is worth nothing to a buyer who can't tell that it matches the brand they already know.
Report
Publish what we have, with its date and its source. See if the information is useful to others.
Our first venture
FarmPricing brings price visibility to crop protection products. Farmers and growers look up a product, see the pricing information we have for it, and can ask to be connected with an independent retailer who'll quote them a current number. Growers can report what they paid. Retailers can contribute price sheets and hear from buyers already looking at their products.
Agriculture came first for a reason. Prices move with the season and the deal, the same product can carry very different numbers a county apart, and almost nobody in the market can see past their own corner of it. If transparency changes anything anywhere, it should be visible here.
FarmPricing
Just Prices.
The first venture of Just Prices, LLC.
- Market. Crop protection products: herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, PGRs.
- For growers. Research products and see reported pricing with its date and source.
- For retailers. Contribute pricing without your name on each price, and hear from interested buyers.
- Where. A mobile app for Apple and Android. farmpricing.com
Where the prices come from
Every price is labeled with its source, everywhere it appears. How a price was obtained changes how much weight it deserves, so we don't hide it.
Farmers and growers
Prices voluntarily reported by people participating in the market, through the FarmPricing app.
Retailer partners
Price sheets supplied by participating retailers, displayed without publicly identifying the contributor unless it elects to be identified.